Get all the latest news and updates on Long Overdue only on News18.com. Read all news including political news, current affairs and news headlines online on Long Overdue today. So it’s been a while but I haven’t stopped eating. I have a feeder now and I can feel myself getting fatter! I’m loving it so much I don’t wanna stop I still. Long Overdue Update #4: Illustrator Files Posted by mcmacleod ⋅ ⋅ Leave a comment To facilitate my desire to make props, I need to improve my abilities with Adobe Illustrator, in order to make the patterns I need to build the replicas. Some Long-Overdue Updates There was a time when I wrote and published posts here every week, but the last time I wrote to you was more than 6 months ago. I don’t really know how, but I still get people coming to this site every day, reading about personal experiments or how to change habits.
A Long Overdue Update 2020
It’s been a while since I posted anything on here. It’s been a crazy time. With the pandemic, I’ve spent the vast majority of my time in the house, not venturing out for anything but groceries and an occasional errand. In theory, that should have given me plenty of time to write. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case. My head just hasn’t been in the game. But I feel the tide turning. My plan is to write more often here on the blog as a way of rebuilding that writing muscle, and with the intent of using that stronger muscle to get back to my in-progress books.
So, let me tell you a little about those books. The first is tentatively titled Second Chances. It’s about a high school basketball team from the 80s. They go to the state championship, but lose to a team that is discovered to have cheated, having two ineligible older players. The scheme is revealed, but the state athletic association fails to adequately punish the cheaters, leaving the kids from the losing team little salve for their wounds.
Now it’s thirty-seven years later and players from that losing team, all in their mid-50s, have moved on with their lives. Or have they? Each of the members of the team struggles with issues from their state championship loss years after it happened. They’ve tried to move on, built families and careers, but there’s an empty space in each of them that they haven’t been able to fill. That is, until one of them concocts the idea of putting the team back together to compete in the state senior Olympics.
The novel follows each of the players through their lives, looking at how the state championship loss so long ago affected them, and how putting the team back together changes things.
Publication of Second Chances was originally scheduled for 12/1/20, but I have a feeling it may be delayed a bit.
The second book is tentatively titled Paris, but I’m almost certain to change that. The book was inspired by the Jimmy Buffet song “He Went to Paris,” which in turn was inspired by the life of Eddie Balchowsky, a one-armed veteran of the Spanish-American War who went on to become an artist and musician in Chicago. Buffet isn’t the only one to write a song inspired by Eddie. So did Loudon Wainwright, Utah Phillips, and Dion Dimucci (of Dion and The Belmonts fame).
The story follows a starry-eyed dreamer as he graduates from college (a rarity in the 1920s) and travels to Paris to solve some of the mysteries that trouble his mind. There, he meets and befriends Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other members of The Lost Generation, all ex-pat artists who flocked to Paris after the first World War.
He gets a job as a newspaper reporter documenting the burgeoning blues scene, and meets an actress, who eventually becomes his wife. They move to England and he opens one of the first blues clubs in London. For a while, their life is idyllic. Their love deepens, they have a child, and the club prospers. But England is soon drawn into a war with Germany that leaves his life (and much of England) in tatters.
Paris (or whatever I end up calling it) is looking like it could become a novella. It still needs a lot of work, and I’m not sure when it will be published, although I’m leaning toward mid-to-late 2021.
In the coming days and weeks, I plan on writing much more here. In addition to book news, I want to start sharing more everyday things. In the past, I’ve avoided writing much about my life, except as it pertains to my books or short stories. I think I’d like to expand that a little by including my thoughts on other topics as well. Keep an eye out. We’ll see where this goes.
Whew.
When I look at how much time has passed since I published anything in the Sixth Sense series, I’m embarrassed. I released the third book in the series, Truth and Consequences, in 2015. I released a revised and expanded version of the first story in the series, Unspeakable Words, in 2017. From then, nothing but crickets.
It’s no secret I’ve been struggling these last four years. What I find interesting is how my personal and professional traumas all dovetailed with the election of Donald Trump as the US President. No, I don’t blame all my trials and losses on the Trump presidency, but the additional weight of the gross corruption and incompetency of his administration—as well as the corrosion of civil rights, environmental controls, and the utter and complete failure to even attempt to manage a deadly pandemic–were additional body blows when I’d already been felled by one hit after another. I’ve made no bones about that.
It doesn’t help that I’m an empath. I internalize the emotions of those around me every bit is much as Gem in the Star Trek:TOS episode with the eponymous title. I never knew that was a thing until recently, but it makes a ton of sense now. And let me tell you, the collective despair of nearly everyone I knew made it difficult to deal with already challenging situations in my own life.
For years now, I’ve promised to finish the Sixth Sense series. To not leave the few–but dedicated–fans hanging indefinitely. The more time that has passed, the harder it has been to pick up the threads of the story arc, and the fears that whatever I write will disappoint grow larger with each passing year.
Long Overdue In A Sentence
Well, no more. With the declaration of Joe Biden as our president, it’s as though a huge weight has been lifted from me. Are all our problems going to magically disappear? No. Sadly, we have a crapton of work to do in order to both undo the damage caused by the Trump administration and to insure the safety of democracy for the future. We are still in the grip of a pandemic that is spreading exponentially in the US and we’re running out of time to effect climate change. Strides made in civil rights have been seriously eroded by an administration that embraced fascism and gave permission to white supremacists to crawl out of the woodwork.
Long Overdue Quest
But for the first time in a long time, I don’t feel as though I’m a passenger in a bus being driven toward a cliff by people who seem to believe their wealth or faith will prevent their half of the bus from being destroyed.
What that means is yesterday, for the first time in years, I’ve opened the draft of Deal with the Devil, the final installment of the Sixth Sense series, and have begun working on it again. While it’s probably a bit late to give it the NaNo treatment, my goal is to have a completed draft by the end of this year and to publish it early next spring. To hold my feet to the fire, I intend to contact the artist who did the updated covers and secure the final one.
Let’s do this, people.